Convention Planning – Session Planning Committee By Dr. Manish Mehta, Detroit, MI
Dr. Manish Mehta is an engineer and entrepreneur settled in Ann Arbor, MI, USA, and was educated in East Africa, India, Singapore, and the US. He is a JAINA Director from Jain Society of Greater Detroit since 2004, a past Regional VP of JAINA (2009-13), and currently Chairs the Diaspora Committee. He has been involved with JAINA Diaspora Conferences and Convention Programming since 2009 and was a member of the 2021 Convention Planning Board.
Committee Members: Dilip Parekh (Chair, Los Angeles, CA), Dr. Manish Mehta (Co-Chair, Detroit, MI), Dilip V Shah (Philadelphia, PA), Dilip R. Shah (Dallas, TX), Piyush Gandhi (Chicago, IL), Nayan Jain (San Francisco, CA), Raj Kumar Jain (Franklin, NJ), Sharad Doshi (Washington DC), Sapan Doshi (Los Angeles, CA), Mahesh Wadher (Los Angeles, CA), Haresh Shah (Delaware), Dhiman Vora (Ahmedabad, India). It was an honor and privilege to work on the 2021 JAINA Convention Board and to Co-Chair the Session Planning Committee with a dedicated team of seasoned JAINA and Jain Center leaders from across the US. I have been involved in JAINA Convention session planning since 2011 and derive great pleasure from working collaboratively through the challenges that each one poses. However, the 2021 Convention planning experience will surely stand out in everyone’s memory for the unique and unprecedented circumstances we worked together in. I enjoy reading and networking widely; and dabble in all kinds of medias, ranging from printed newspapers to magazines and lately, lots of social media. Subconsciously, I am always on the lookout for speakers who have unique perspectives and could be a potential fit due to their demonstrated interests or accomplishments that reinforce Jain values or could inspire our audiences. I enjoy outreach opportunities to engage new individuals, motivating them by forming relationships, and orienting them on JAINA or Jainism’s core principles and values. Unique 2021 Convention Circumstances Once it was clear in summer 2020 that the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t going away anytime soon and the many-levels of safety restrictions posed too many risks to organize an in-person Convention, a decision was taken by the Convention Board in September 2020 to hold a virtual convention. The Convenors and Board focused on adapting convention planning efforts towards staging a 100% virtual convention where no travel would be involved.
Our Session Planning Committee’s work started when the convention board decided to incorporate the pandemic-survival learnings in the convention theme: “Jainism: A Resilient Path to Peace.” This very relevant theme was our Committee’s driver for screening and recruiting speakers who could motivate and infuse confidence in diverse audiences, especially our youth and the senior citizens – many of whom had remained isolated for long periods. It was also announced that the Convention would be a sixday event from July 1-6, 2021. This required our Committee to come up with engaging programming for nearly 60 hours over the entire US Independence Day holiday weekend, and beyond! Session Planning Committee’s Responsibilities The Session Planning committee’s many responsibilities included – planning overall schedule of events for the 6 days; discussing with various JAINA committees and community groups about requirements for their events during the convention and allocating them appropriate time-slots and virtual meeting rooms; inviting speakers for the main evening sessions and other enrichment sessions held in the morning; deciding on scheduling speaker sessions with good balance of topics and languages presented each day; scheduling other cultural and religious events; working with speakers to get their videos and bios; informing speakers and meeting leads about the Laaveo platform and their session schedule; assigning committee members and other volunteers to record introduction videos; working with Multi-Media Technology (MMT) team to coordinate efforts in finalizing the speaker session videos to meet the consistency and quality ideals. 23 23
